Joli Lapin hops all around London town to sift through all the rubbish and find something special. From retro, vintage, designer to highstreet, charity shop chic has never looked (or tasted!) so good.

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Home Cooking

My parents are signed up for the "Organic Box"program, which means a box of seasonal organic vegetables is delivered to their doorstep each week. Lately they have been getting a lot of the same veg as the kitchen is overflowing with pumpkins, potatoes and butternut squash. I guess it's winter! To clear some space, and put the vegetables to good use, I decided to make a curried pumpkin, butternut squash, yam, potato and green apple soup and it turned out to be super yummy!

I loosely followed a recipe from Epicurious on my iphone, but I mainly made it up as I went along. If you would like to make this at home, first bake your vegetables (cut in half and face down) for about 50 minutes at 350C - take out and let cool. Chop an onion, and soften in a large pot with olive oil, add lots of garlic and ginger to the mix. At this point, I added roughly chopped granny smith apples before transferring everything to the food processor. Blend the mixture until smooth and return it to your pot. Next, scoop out the baked veg into the food processor, blend until smooth and add to the pot. Add 2-3 cups of chicken stock and stir everything together well. The mixture can tend to be quite thick so depending on how much you are making you can add more chicken stock, or milk to give it a creamier taste. I played around with just about every spice in the kitchen, but I would highly recommend adding salt, fresh ground pepper, 1 tablespoon of brown sugar, cumin, cinnamon and curry powder to taste.